


how soon is now?

by clytemnestras



Category: New Girl
Genre: Clothed Sex, F/M, Frottage, Future Fic, Mid-life Crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-25 01:25:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12025170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: "Happy ten years, Jessica."





	how soon is now?

**Author's Note:**

> this has been germinating for a while (a while being long before last season aired) and I'm very unsure about it, but here it is anyway

It's late, so Jess doesn't expect to be found on the roof. Sometimes she just likes to feel tall. All the city lights span out beneath her like stars, bright and shining, and it fills her with something like calm. She could count them, chart them like constellations, learn the pattern of it all and knit a blanket with those lines of intersection that are only hers to divine. 

 

The breeze hits her sharply, makes her shiver as it cuts through her hair to expose her neck and maybe it's easier to just catalogue the sensations as they hit her than think about why she's awake at 3am on a Wednesday morning, looking out at a darkened Los Angeles. 

 

Life expectancies get longer by the day, it seems unfair that she’s still so close to touching her mid-life crisis, and it’s worse that it doesn’t feel like a new fear, but something that’s been clinging to her shoulders for a while now. 

 

The cold pushes her back towards the door and she lets the night finally tire her out.

 

*

 

She doesn't think they use the beach enough. It is right there spilling out in front of them, huge and anonymous and big enough to swallow them all whole. But when it's dark and they are huddled together under the stars, clinging and trying hard not to punch each other in the jaw, it feels like theirs. 

 

(It's possible that she's making the beach a physical manifestation of their myriad issues.)

 

Tonight, though, they storm the sands like Gods. And okay, she has - they all have - been drinking since noon. The champagne is bubbling inside her like ichor, maybe, and she really needs to get Greek myth slotted into either the english or history curriculum because every kid should feel the way Schmidt does when he tells the sky he’s  _ invincible, Achillean, _ and barrels forward on the sand, trailing Cece behind him. (Jess doesn’t tell him what  _ else _ Achillean means, and Schmidt thrusts his chin forward, proudly and joyful.) 

 

“Now I have sand in places that will never come out.” Cece shoves him softly but he rolls himself on top of her anyway. Aly and Winston manage to tiptoe around them but Jess stumbles across an outstretched arm, the breeze splaying her hair across her eyes.

 

“Baby, I swear I will find every spec on your perfect body and restore it like the sculpture it is.” Schmidt combs his fingers through Cece’s hair, ceaselessly careful not to tangle it, and Jess doesn't know when she grew immune to this level of gross, but she's smiling, anyway.

 

“Yeah you better.” Cece leans up, kisses first, takes whatever he offers her.

 

“You people disgust me,” Nick says, head tipped toward the sun, edges blurred by the light. “I'm gonna go dig a hole. It’ll be the Buckingham Palace of holes. I’ll name it New Nicksville.”

 

“What about Miller Manor?” Her voice catches on the last syllable, like it surprised it's way straight out of her numbed mouth. She tries the shapes out again, because it's muscle memory, and all she needs is to practice.

 

He smiles. “I like the way you think, Day. I'm naming you Chancellor.”

 

“Please,” Schmidt huffs, stumbling to his feet. “You don't even know what a Chancellor is. I should be in charge of this whole shabby operation.”

 

“I'm taking a chance on her, therefore, Chancellor.” Nick shoves Schmidt, and he hardly moves, and they all forget, sometimes that he works so hard to reach perfection.

 

Schmidt shoves back and Nick almost falls. Sand arcs around their feet, catching the setting sun.

 

“You passed the bar exam, how did you still end up like this this?” There's not a lick of venom there but Nick pounces on him anyway.

 

It's ridiculous how impenetrable they are, arms locked around heads and hands curled entirely too tight around wrists. 

 

Cece slips her arm into Jess’.  

 

“We’ll never have love like that,” she says, digging her toes into the sand. Nick and Schmidt are collapsed in a pile together and Winston is edging around, trying to insert himself or pull them apart. It's hard to tell. Jess hipchecks Cece so hard she almost knocks them both over and God they're  _ hammered  _ and it's only six in the evening.

 

“I’ll have you know my love for you is stronger and even more violent than drunk fratboy love and you know it.” She pulls Cece around and catches both of her hands, spinning her like they did when they were kids and were getting their highs off of dizziness instead of boys or sneaked hits of weed passed around behind the pizza place back home.

 

If someone had told her that she would be edging dangerously over forty on a beach in California, still hanging on her best friend’s fingertips and locked inextricably with several codependent men she found on the internet...

 

Well, she might have believed it. She's a dreamer like that.

 

“All of you people are incredibly weird. Just so we're clear on that.” Aly shakes her hair free from it's ponytail and stretches out enough that Cece can catch her hands and reel her in.

 

“Oh you bet your ass we are,” Cece says pulling sharply on Aly’s arm and Jess barely has enough time to laugh before they're all crashing into the sand.

 

Nick elbows Schmidt, who slaps his hand down on Winston's shoulder. “It's happening.”

 

“It's not happening.”

 

“Dammit don't get my hopes up like that. This is the worst roommate-iversary ever.”  Schmidt pouts, but stays watching them with rapt attention. He smiles brightly when his eyes lock on Jess. “Happy ten years, Jessica.”

 

She smiles back and smacks Cece on the ass, because she's drunk and because she can, and because it's almost like giving him a thank you. “Puppypiles are not a substitute for cake, I hope you all know.”

 

Winston stands, his foot on the small of Nick’s back as if that could hold him down. “Coach sent a cake from his favourite bakery in New York and it got, um, destroyed, and I repurposed it into catfood. However, I saved you a beer in his honor. It's his favourite kind and he said to savour every drop like you might die immediately after consumption. The city has made him so damn dramatic.”

 

She takes the beer, lying on her belly and letting the coolness of the bottle rest against her cheek for a second before tipping it into her mouth.

 

She doesn't remember the taste much, just the feeling of it flooding her body and everything, everyone tumbling into one another.

 

Nick grabs her arm and she doesn't remember when they stopped lying on the sand, or where the big hole they're gathered around came from, or when everyone decided the moon was too high in the sky for them to stay out any longer, but she lets him help her to her feet, staring at his arms the whole time. She can feel the sand on his palms press against the soft skin of her wrist. Watches how the muscles flex as he takes her weight on alongside her own.

 

*

 

All her presents are catalogued, lined up in a row on the bookshelf. The order is disorganised, Cece’s is first (the most  _ Jess _ ), Schmidt's follows, (most expensive), Winston’s is lovingly framed in the middle (homemade, falling apart) and Nick’s is on the other end, right there when she walks in the door, closest to hand. 

 

She stares at them for a while, still buzzed, sand still clinging to her bare, crossed legs. She picks up the photo frame, silver, plain but sturdy and serving it’s purpose. All of them look back at her, laughing the way they had been the night she got back from jury duty, Coach winking at the camera, Reagan smiling and clinging to her glass, Cece’s arm around Jess’ waist and the guys drawn all around her, half in embrace. She doesn’t want to tell the photo it’s her favourite gift, because it seems unfair to every other beautiful thing that she’s looking at, and that she loves, too. But it seems like when she’s watching her own tears puddle on the glass, blurring each of their faces that it has to realise what it has done to her. 

 

She has to put it down, wipe it off with the blanket on the end of her bed before someone sees the mess she’s made of her gift and of herself and when she’s wiped her eyes dry it’s all fine, again. The frame sits on the end of the shelf, six (seven, if she counts herself, which she doesn’t, really) faces smiling at her and herself smiling back at them from the doorway.

 

*

 

He finds her in the dark. She shouldn't be surprised. She tries not to be.

 

The couch has lost most of its spring now and there's no reason she should be there when there's so many empty rooms. When she whispers his name she can hear a slight echo waver through the room.

 

He curls up behind her so they're touching all the way along their bodies and the whole couch sags underneath them, springs threatening to buckle under the weight. She knows the ease with which he ghosts his mouth along her neck is a lie, because it's not ever easy, it's white-blinding-frightening-incredible, always.

 

His hands are familiar and terribly warm. She flushes everywhere as his rough hands slide under her shirts and drag over the soft skin of her abdomen, lets little sounds spill out because he’s just plucking them straight from her insides as he moves. He maps her out, when his warm hands cup her breasts she shudders and shifts her weight back against him, and he exhales like she’s just knocked all the air out of his body, which,  _ oh,  _ maybe she has.

 

Neither one says anything, because this is what they are, have always been, action and reaction. They feed off one another in a terrible little symbiosis and right now he reads every signal of her body to draw her deeply into the feeling of his fingers and her body and his rocking against it.

 

She wonders if he has a mixtape for this. Somber, drunken, midlife crisis sexytimes.

 

His flannel shirt slides off the couch and onto the floor and it's odd to think that when she met him it was novel that he dressed in layers to ward off the cold and not to offset the patterns of a thrift store bargain sweater.  He twists his hand as his mouth fastens to that place along the nape of her neck that makes all the nerves in her body want to unravel like lousy wool and every thought but the heat of their bodies and the darkness of the room splayed out for them is banished to the ether.

 

She tries to smother her cries, into the arm of the couch, because sounds make it solid. She can’t be real, now, solid and unravelling at the edges, fading into the dark. She moves against him, just small enough to let his knee slip between hers, to make his thumb slip roughly against her clit in that way that has always made her squirm. The problem is he has these hands, frayed worker’s hands that pull so perfectly at her softness. The problem is he just bulldozes all of her control and suddenly she’s just there on the edge, listening to him pant into her ear softly, a counterpoint to the hurried way his hips are grinding into hers, and the way his fingers are plucking away at her careful control.

 

She can feel how warm he is, how hard, thinking dazedly  _ I did that _ . She rocks back more, needing to touch closer, feel more of his body heat and his body, period. His hand keeps her pressed to him, where he needs her and where, clearly, they need each other. He rocks her into him and she keeps moving back, keeps pushing them both until the darkness just swells straight up and swallows them, her vision black and her body twitching for him - his hand against her, his thigh caught vice-like between her legs. When she can breathe and see, her hand slides back to find his hips he draws her away, burrowing into her space, wrapping his body around hers. When she nudges her hip back again he’s only half hard, breathing shallowly into her shoulder.

 

She turns around, mouths the curve of his jaw before she can find his mouth, and long before she can meet his eyes. 

 

“Bad night?” He asks her, destroying the silence they’d gathered, tracing the line from her forehead to the tip of her nose.

 

Is it really as simple as that?  _ Bad night? _

 

“Yeah,” she says, “bad night. Better with you here.”

 

It doesn’t make all the difference. The room is still dark just like the sky over Los Angeles and the environment has gone to hell and the country is barreling that way too and she is still just there, hanging on the precipice of it all. But he has her hand. He traces the curve of her knuckles with his calloused fingers, laces them together and squeezes tight. 

 

“I love you.”

 

“I know, Jess. I’ve got you.”

**Author's Note:**

> come chat with me on tumblr [@bohemicns](http://bohemicns.tumblr.com) if you feel so inclined


End file.
